Tommy’s Film Blog

The film Mulholland Drive develops a narrative by creating an enigma. Throughout the film, this enigma is used to create a mysterious narrative where what exactly is going on isn’t clear until the end, and even then it can still raise questions. At surface level, the plot is a woman named Betty has moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, where she meets another woman named Rita who has been involved in a car crash, and is now suffering from amnesia. The two work together to help Rita rediscover her true identity. It captures dream-like Los Angeles, however underneath the surface it uncovers a much darker underbelly., which a lot of doesn't make sense when taken out of context early on within the film, but begins to be explained as the film progresses. This serves as an enigma as while it is mysterious and difficult to understand, it becomes clearer the more and more the story unravels and more context is given. This is effective within the film as the narrative would be bo

 The first plot twist in High Maintenance is logical. While, I didn't find it surprising as the connection to the character had not yet been built, it served as a red herring for the second plot twist. The second plot twist however, when the woman is also revealed to be an android, this is a lot more surprising and feels inevitable upon rewatch. For example, the fact that the female has a lot more emotion than the male in the opening makes it unexpected, but upon rewatch, you begin to see foreshadowing, such as repeated dialogue in the dinner table conversation, giving the feeling that they are constantly on repeat, and not thinking of subjects for conversations as naturally as real humans, and a resemblance in appearance to each other, suggesting that they may be more alike than the female character and the audience thinks. Even the mise-en-scene feels robotic, with the low key, hard lighting and repetitive, simplistic music. The acting fells very "off" throughout the sh

Review of Vertigo Vertigo is a 1958 film, directed and written by Alfred Hitchcock at the peak of his career. This came out at a similar time to some of his other most well-known and most loved classics such as Rear Window, North by Northwest and Psycho, and yet it still manages to stand out to me as his best, and I'm not alone in thinking this, not only is it considered the greatest film ever made in the BFI's critics poll but it is also 9th in a similar list by the AFI. Personally, it is my third favourite film, behind only Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror.  Hitchcock is known as being "The Master of Suspense" by many and this film is no exception, but also feels like it makes more changes to Hitchcock's formula than all other films by him that I've seen. It contains all of the suspense and style of his previous films that he is known for, including conventions of the film noir being released at this time, which incl

 Pitch Black Heist definitely conforms to the expectations of a typical heist film. It starts by sticking to many of these conventions. It uses the characters that are expected, for example the comedic relief character and the character that fails due to emotion, it has the training scenes of your average heist film, where the characters go over every step of the plan; however, where Pitch Black Heist differs is with the heist itself, in which rather than focusing on the spectacle it does the completely opposite, and becomes a family drama where you don't see any of the heist but you only hear dialogue.